A few interesting modern pixel fonts
unsung.aresluna.orgAnalog Mono and Two Slice are really neat. If you like those, you'll probably also like another of my favorite modern pixel fonts: Departure Mono. https://departuremono.com
It feels like the one used in the Papers, Please video game.
Beautiful! Thank you!
Came here to say the same, I actually like Departure so much I use it as my coding and Terminal font. I'll definitely be trying out the fonts in the original post.
I made myself a pixel font for composite (well, monochrome) video output on an RP2040:
https://github.com/PhobGCC/PhobGCC-SW/blob/main/PhobGCC/rp20...
(search for 1 to see letterforms)
The letters are 8x15 and verticals are 2 pixels wide to work better on older CRT televisions with less-sophisticated chroma filtering on their composite inputs.
I explicitly tried to avoid locking into 45 degree diagonals...
My only question now is, how do I turn this font into something I can use on a computer? I couldn't figure it out the last time I tried.
I like https://viznut.fi/unscii/ - meant for ascii art but still works well in a terminal, and still gets unicode updates
The 'fantasy' version reminds me of the Sleipnir font for Dwarf Fortress. Neat! http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/File:Andux_sleipnir_8...
Geist looks like unadulterated garbage, a sloppy rendition of a vector font onto a pixel grid, lack of character and care to banding and shape...
I worked on an embedded project a few years ago using a tiny 128x64 display and wanted to use a pixel font but none of the ones I found made me particularly happy so I made my own. Turns out it is very easy to do. Font Forge is fantastic and very easy to use and once you get going by nailing down a few letters at the size you want you can quickly make something that is cohesive, pleasant, and easy to read. I highly recommend this as an exercise.
As a bonus I added a bunch of open source icons as font glyphs for my project and it was really fun to figure out how small I can make them while still being distinctive.
So, Analog Mono and Geist both have enough pixels per glyph that they don't really read as pixel fonts below sizes of ~20px. Analog kinda aleviates that by being made up of big (overlapping) blocks of 2x2 pixels. Geist just kinda looks like a downscaled vector font (to me) though.
It looks like a high-DPI X11 font to me. It isn't particularly original or unique.
I am very fond of Gohu font. I have used it on a recent static blog formatting adventure http://dntbl.ink , converted to woff2. I couldn't be happier with how it renders and gives that VAX feel.
as a lover of low resolution software, we must acknowledge the goat, never surpassed since 2003: https://www.dafont.com/04b-03.font
nowadays all the alpha exists in making your software look like a cool fantasy tome: https://skeddles.itch.io/eldring-pro
Only to be rivalled by the long-standing Elisa font (also from Japan, like the 04 font) https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/111533004449746944...
That's 2 advanced for me ...
> Geist Pixel isn’t a novelty font. It’s a system extension.
Okay LLM
To be fair, that's a direct quote from Vercel themselves introducing Geist Pixel: https://vercel.com/blog/introducing-geist-pixel
ya because Vercel generated the copy with an LLM
Some people wrote like that before LLMs polluted the water.
Just like people used em dashes before LLMs.
I used bullet points heavily before LLMs.
I felt personally attacked when LLMs came out: I'm an avid user of "—", bullets, numbered lists, and the word "delve". It's been a miserable couple of years.
LLMs write like that because people wrote like that. Enough, unfortunately for my remaining love of humanity, to cause the LLMs to adopt the quirk.
I know. That’s my point.
People talk about LLM writing style like it’s a unique butterfly and humans don’t write that they. But we do. Which is why LLMs do too.
Many many years ago I wrote a book for Apress, and the style guide for that instilled in me a lot of practices that now make my writing feel LLM-ish to some readers:
- Use bulleted lists, but always introduce and conclude a list with prose; a list can't immediately follow a heading or end a section.
- Use a mix of long and short sentences; in long sentences with parentheticals, use a mix of commas, parens, semicolons, and em dashes.
- With multiple continuous blocks of prose that aren't naturally broken up by an illustration or heading, start a paragraph with an inline bold statement to help anchor the reader.
I still use bullets extensively. You can easily tell when a human writes them when they are trees instead of lists.
I don't think even that is a reliable indicator because I'm currently reviewing an LLM generated bullet tree right now.
For sure, but I don't think I'm going to give Vercel benefit of the doubt that they aren't writing their copy with an LLM.
but what does that even mean?
I don't know if it counts as a 'pixel' font, but https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ has hand-drawn bitmaps for a huge swath of unicode (and hand-hinting for aliased rendering IIRC?)
It's not quite as overtly retro, but it's a great functional font, and a great art object besides (at least that's how I justified the price!_
>Andrew Gleeson designed Analog Mono, “fixing the crimes of VCR OSD Mono.” There used to be this classic pixel font that you’d see everywhere in the 1990s on hi-fi equipment: VCRs, TVs, camcorders, etc. One of its challenges was a low baseline which resulted in all the letters with descenders pulled up
"VCR OSD Mono is a free bitmap font created by Riciery Leal, inspired by the on-screen display text of vintage VCRs. It is suitable for retro designs and supports 39 languages"
VCR OSD Mono committed no crimes, but it is a crime to make that accusation. VCR OSD Mono faithfully duplicated VCR ASCII character generation. If you want to "fix" it, what's stopping you from "fixing" it all the way to Helvetica or Times or Typewriter? Give a rationale that justifies your own changes, but don't attack others who have a rationale for theirs.
it's fine you want to make a new font. it's not fine to point fingers at people who did a more faithful job than you.
Hey .. you do need to know that font people regularly reference each other like this .. its kind of a thing in typography, and its a means of demonstrating inspiration and lineage, more than anything else - calling out ones inspiration, in fact.
If there is any one particular hat who can sell controversy, its the typographer.
>fix it all the way to Helvetica
..
Akzidenz-Grotesk Helvetica || gtfo, nichtwa?
Very cool! Analog mono has a very “Christmas sweater” vibe.
Sarah Cadigan-Fried has designed some very cool modern pixel art fonts worth checking! https://www.soft-type.com/
There's an interesting symmetry between the knitting, perler bead and pixel art crowds.
There was a talk at a Linux conference a while back relating knitting to programming and I’ve yet to watch it because the audio on YT wasn’t great but it’s on my list.
I find knitting very soothing, and it also scratches the same itch as programming.
See also, beach pebbles.
if we are doing a survey, there is spleen which was adopted as the default console font for openbsd.
I want better Topaz. My favourite font.
I still use it (sometimes 1.x, sometimes 2.x) in terminals and IDEs to this day
Could somebody explain the Coral Pixel font? It makes no sense to me, given that the whole point of sub pixels was to look sharp without looking colorful. It only ever looked like that when you took a screenshot and then zoomed in, which seems extremely niche.
All technology, no matter how undesirable it once felt, eventually becomes nostalgic for somebody.
Depends on the DPI of your monitor and your glasses prescription.
My pixel font of choice is Sans Nouveaux[0] (requires Flash). It's MIT licensed too.
Also here at DaFont: https://www.dafont.com/px-sans-nouveaux.font
Two Slice is shockingly readable.
got caught up on decoding 'tends'
I find our human need to embrace nostalgia interesting. That we would design blocky “pixel fonts” in vector formats so that we can scale and resize them is quite ironic.
The first font on the page mentions raising up descenders (g j p q y) so that pixels don't go below the baseline. You can often find characters with minimal descenders in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, or Korean) fonts. Sometimes a raised-descender version is found among the fullwidth-form letters.
Coral Pixels is pretty nice with a lighter background, but unreadable with a dark one.
Two Slice is smaller than other tiny pixel fonts I've seen. Maybe the smallest legible font? Depends on your definition of legibility I guess.
Previous discussion (124 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45236263
Two Slice doesn’t seem readable, is there a Threeslice?
I'm a big fan of Departure Mono, very neat website design as well
Kumiko Yoshida should be brought before the war crimes tribunal or something. ClearType eyehurt is something that very much needs to stay in the past.
loving pixel geist.